Anesthesia is the process of making a patient insensible to pain and other sensations. It is the creation of a condition in which painful, traumatic, stressful, unpleasant, boring, or frightening experiences are made palatable. This process is commonly achieved with drugs both general and local. The process also requires modification of the autonomic nervous system to eliminate sympathetic and parasympathetic responses to the painful stimulus.
If a patient has been rendered insensate to the surgical stimulus through use of a local anesthetic, and the autonomic nervous system is blocked through the use of adrenergic blockade, alpha-2 agonists and vasodilators, there is still the problem of psychological distraction from the actual surgical process. Surgery can be very boring or frightening to patients. Patients are frequently given general anesthesia, simply because the case is long, and the anesthesiologist assumes the patient will not want to lie still for several hours.
People have tested and used music to provide distraction for surgical and dental procedures. Dentists use audiovisual distraction systems for dental care. There are numerous head mounted displays for use in other situations. We have not found a description of the use of audiovisual anesthesia in the operating room.